‘Life May Suck but Christmas Is Great’ for Billy Hough

Billy Hough doesn’t actually hate the holidays, which is good for him, since he’ll soon be laying on the holiday cheer at the Gifford House’s Holly Folly Sing-along.

“I love Christmas,” he says. “I’m a suburban middle-class American kid from the ’70s. I like the superficial pagan American holiday that Christmas has become. I like the ridiculous nostalgia of it, and the way people of all religious backgrounds participate.”

Gifford House patrons will be familiar with Hough’s seasonal piano bar act, in which he plays his favorites and crowd requests. They may also know him for “Scream Along with Billy,” a club act in which he and bassist Sue Goldberg perform entire albums for bar crowds who do indeed scream along. The pair are currently in residency at New York’s Club Cumming, and have staged tributes to David Bowie, Dusty Springfield and Tom Petty. Hough’s aesthetic is scrappy punk, and his shows tend toward the tragically absurd — a far cry from the typical Christmas cheer.

“I think for some people the idea of me playing Christmas tunes is about as much of a Beckett play as you’re going to get on the Cape in December,” Hough says. “When I first started at Holly Folly, I assumed everyone would be so sick of Christmas music I wouldn’t have to play any. I showed up at the Gifford House on Friday at 5:30 with a bunch of Iggy Pop and David Bowie.”

The Holly Folly crowd wasn’t having it. Hough continues, “The place was packed with people wearing sweatshirts with lights on them. I’d never seen anything like it. These people were deeply into Christmas.”

Over the years, Hough has found a way to make the old songs his own. “My policy is to give the people what they want — with a few exceptions,” he says with a laugh. “I’m an entertainer and I like to entertain. So we made a separate peace between me and those of the Christmas sweater.”

And the peace endures. “When you think about it,” Hough adds, “the Holly Folly gig isn’t that different from my other work. There’s something about the Gifford House that viscerally harkens back to the old Irish and English music halls. The soup du jour is songs everybody knows, everyone can sing with. That makes it easy to translate what I do into a Christmas version.”

Hough grew up in the South, where he belonged to the Methodist Church. “My grandpa sang in the choir,” he remembers. “The Methodists were philosophical. We did not take the Bible literally. We studied the Bible as myths. It suited me — it didn’t burn me out on religion as quickly as many of my friends.”

That early training contributes to Hough’s interpretation of the season. “If you boil Christmas down to its roux, like many other Judeo-Christian holidays, it’s all about hope. The world was coming to an end, and a star appeared. The oil was running out but it lasted for eight days. Deep at the heart of it, that’s why people like these traditions. Especially at moments like this, when the jury is still out as to whether the world is ending, we can all get on board for that.”

Hough, whose father died relatively recently, feels that music helps people find their way through what can be rough times.

“It’s hard not to remember the people who aren’t there at the holidays,” he says. “That part of Christmas accumulates over time. There’s also a pressure to be happy and joyous and feeling like you’re doing something wrong if you’re not.”

For those moments, Hough has a store of sad songs, some of them his own compositions. With his band, GarageDogs, he wrote “Life May Suck but Christmas Is Great,” a song he describes as “mostly about being broke and strung-out in Boston.” The music video for his single “O Little Town of Bethlehem, New York,” directed by Nina West, features Hough at the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis, forlornly riding the carousel and sliding dollar bills into a vending machine.

“You’re not supposed to film in the mall,” Hough says, laughing. “We told the security guy I wanted to send some videos to my girlfriend overseas, and we got away with it.”

Yet Hough says there’s sweetness in the malaise. “Christmas is the one time of year that somebody’s going to give you a present. Somebody will invite you to a dinner, you’ll get to go to a party. Christmas puts cranberry sauce on your despair.”